TVC Church Eco Report

“The earth is the Lord′s, and everything in it”
Psalm 24 v 1

As TVC Church, we recognise that this world was created by and belongs to God – and that we have a responsibility to steward it well. We want to let you know what we are doing to be mindful of how we operate as a Church and to introduce some plans to improve our stewardship of this world.

We asked Facilities Manager Paul to update us…

What improvements have been made in the last few years to make TVC Church more sustainable?

Firstly, we have been making some significant improvements to how our buidings run. Replacing old light fittings with LED lights has reduced the amount of energy we were using to light our buildings, by around 50%. Approximately 75% of our lighting is now LED and we have plans to move to 100% LED lighting within the next year.

We have also replaced some of our old, inefficient gas heating equipment with modern units, which further reduces the amount of energy that we use and we have installed intelligent sensors in the male WC’s to reduce water usage at urinals.

The introduction of recycling bins means that we are now recycling 45% of our rubbish, including all recyclable plastics, plus our paper, cardboard, metal, glass and timber. Thank you to everyone who takes the extra few seconds to sort their rubbish – this actually makes a big difference. We have also encouraged all staff to go paperless where they can.

Last year we also had a bike rack installed at The Oakwood. This was in response to requests made by some of our Three13 learners, but it also serves our TVC Church family who travel by bike and some of our Coffee Shop customers. As the weather improves, we encourage you to think about biking to the Oakwood, particularly as the cycle track is extended along Durham Lane.

What improvements are in the pipeline?

We have loads of ideas for how to further improve sustainability across our sites including improvements to our infrastructure and making use of new technology – of course there is usually high cost in this and so we are always keeping sustainability in mind, as we carefully steward the budgets for our buildings.

One big change that we intend to make in the next few months is very low cost and will make a big difference and that is…cups!

Ok so what difference can cups make?

Each Sunday at the Oakwood, we are using a huge amount of paper cups. Even though we have gone out of our way to make sure that we purchase cups that can be recycled, we discovered on further research that there are only 4 places in the UK that actually recycle paper cups for hot drinks, due to the difficult process of separating out the lining and cardboard. The fuel emissions that would be created if we were to transport our cups all the way to one of these facilities would make the exercise futile.

Now, we know that many of you already have reusable coffee cups in your cupboard at home (if you are anything like me, you have loads of them!) so our first request is this…please bring your reusable cups to Church! If we all make this simple change, we can stop 500 cups a week going to landfill!

If you don’t yet have a re-usable cup, please stop by the Welcome Hub as we have quite a few left over that were bought for an event a few years ago that didn’t get used – we’d love you to make use of one.